Every time there's news of a remake or a reboot or a re-imagining, people will inevitably bitch that "Hollywood is running out of ideas!" They bemoan that it shows the general lack of creativity in Hollywood, and whine about how there are no new ideas anymore. Often, these people won't add anything else to the thread, as though their observation is worthy of posting on its own--as though it were an original thought.
It's getting on my nerves, to be honest.
For one thing, it immediately indicates the speaker's general ignorance of the history of story telling and film in Hollywood. Many of the movies we consider to be all time classics now were remakes themselves. Other movies that we hold up to be great films are simply filmed plays, slightly changed to be appropriate for the silver screen. What producers and directors didn't take from the stage and previous movies, they took from books. When you start naming former Oscar winners and AFI's Top 100 films, you're going to have quite the list of remakes and adaptations.
For another thing, Hollywood has never valued originality. Which is fine. It stems from theater, and while there are a lot of wonderful truly original stories, many are just "re imaginings" of other plays and classic tales. Shakespeare never told an original story and nobody expected him to. Nobody said "Well, quite frankly, I'm tired of the story of King Lear. Why can't playwrights do something original for once?" Well, okay, they might have, but if they did, nobody noticed or cared.
Also, I think the general bitching has something to do with a real disconnect between what Hollywood values and what the audience values. People who actually write and direct and act for a living know there's no original stories to tell. There just aren't. All of the stories have been told by the ancient Greeks. Sorry, there's nothing to be done about that. But that doesn't stop people from being creative, because it's not the plot that matters, it's how you interpret it. That's why the shot-for-shot remake of Psycho was so pointless. That's not the kind of remake anybody wants or needs, and it wasn't successful. He should have realized that by virtue of the fact that nobody had bothered to do it before. Hollywood values originality in dialogue (see Tarentino, who tells very basic plots ripped off from all kinds of movies, but he has a phenomenal understanding of dialogue and humor), directing, cinematography, etc. In other words, Hollywood wants originality in the language of film not in the plot of stories. So find something else to bitch about, will ya?